25 Oct ARTICLE | History of Russian populism provides important lessons for today

‘When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People’s Stick.’

Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (1873)

Populism is in the air: it’s the topic of the moment, the subject everybody wants to discuss, to dispute, to praise, or to loathe and condemn. Journalists and scholars understandably concentrate on the American and European cases (Trump, Le Pen, Hofer and all that), yet much can be learned about populism from elsewhere, and by examining carefully its history.

Russian populism is an important case in point. Born during the 1860s, populism in that country remains interesting and important, for several reasons. It highlights the way populism is a species of political hypnotism whose talk of “the people” turns real, breathing and blinking people into a phantasm. The Russian case reveals as well why populism has a close affinity with violence, and why intellectuals, who should know better, are often prone to develop an aesthetic fascination for the subject, and the substance, of populism. Finally, and of great importance in making sense of the contemporary grip of Putinism, the Russian case shows that the language of populism, for all its talk of the urgent need to pit the people against the political establishment, can be absorbed by osmosis into the structures of government. In doing so it enable those who govern to rule in the name of “the people”, who become the victims of state power.

The Russian case also reminds us that the ideology of populism is seductive because it has “democratic” qualities. Known locally as narodnichestvo, 19th-century Russian populism was the local substitute for American, British and French-style representative democracy. Russian populism, defended by an intelligentsia that considered itself the only free beings in a political order of slaves, called for Russian unity and government through the Russian people, in opposition to the combined power and authority of the Tsar, the Church and the landed nobility. Populism was born not simply of a bad local reaction to the revolutionary ideals of “representative democracy” that Napoleon’s troops had tried (and failed) to impose by force on the Russian lands. Russian populism registered and absorbed those ideals by acknowledging that the commoners were no longer to be treated like scum. It praised them and spoke constantly of the narod (“people”, “folk”) and the “people’s will”.

Buried deep in the politics of populism everywhere is simple mindedness, the worrying urge to deal with the complexity of the world through wilfully simplified formulae. The Russian case was among the earliest examples. It thrived on a metaphysical, almost apocalyptic presumption: that a clean revolutionary break with the past was both necessary and possible, and that popular upheaval would result in the abolition of dehumanising power structures. This upheaval would be followed by a cleansing, a clarification of the true nature of things which would lead, finally, to full human emancipation.

Populists emphasised the people’s rustic, tellurian qualities. Russian populists generally disliked industrialisation. They were not friends of technical progress, and rejected as false the whole modern idea of the liberation of humanity through the domination of nature driven by markets and science. The populists saw no need for representative mechanisms, for they thought of themselves as bearers of the unchanging essence of the Russian people. That is why state-organised capitalism guided by parliamentary democracy was for them a miserable chimera, an unworkable fantasy that was bound in practice to produce delusion and unhappiness, founded on slavery.

Petr Tkachev (1844-1886)

What then was the political alternative? Russian populists were often at their own throats; no generally agreed vision surfaced. Although they dominated the opposition to czarism during the second half of the nineteenth century, especially from the 1870s, the populists never formed an organised political party and refused a coherent doctrine. It was a movement comprising various organisations and factions, including the anarchists, the Nihilists and the Social Revolutionaries. Their ranks contained regicides, anti-capitalists, and eccentric figures, like Petr Tkachev (1844-1886), who reportedly urged the rebirth of Russia by eliminating every person over the age of 25 years. The populists suffered frequent political setbacks, as in the summer of 1874, when peasants failed to embrace their ascribed role as “the people” by handing student populist agitators clad in peasant clothes over to the Tsar’s police. The harsh realities of czarism nevertheless kept them going, at times united, above all in their emphatic rejection of monarchy and “bourgeois” representative democracy.

Russian populists typically described themselves as “apolitical”, meaning that they had no truck with plutocracy, petit-bourgeois or bourgeois electoral politics and its corresponding fantasy of taking up seats in a parliament. Populists put their faith in a new revolutionary subject – the peasants and small producers – and they were convinced that Russia could leapfrog the age of industrial capitalism and representative government. The typical populist was a Janus, V.I. Lenin wrote, “looking with one face to the past and the other to the future”. Most populists embraced a version of Aleksandr Herzen’s alternative – originally mediaeval – vision of the natural harmony of the mir, the free association of peasants, empowered periodically to redistribute arable land and through its decisions granting each and every peasant an equal say in determining how to live their lives as equals. Populism stood for the protection of the people in the mir by the mir. It imagined the new Russia as a decentralised confederation of self-governing units, as a new type of post-democracy freed from the evils of serfdom, industrialism, capitalism, and the violence of the territorial state.

Sergei Korovin, A Gathering of the Mir (1893)

The point was to change the world by upending old Russia. Tens of thousands of young populists heeded the call (first spelled out in 1868, in a famous article by Mikhail Bakunin in the émigré journal People’s Cause) to “go to the people”. Others known as Jacobins drew the conclusion that “the people” were incapable of liberating themselves. It followed from this that, since their role could only ever be that of a negative, destructive force, the people needed, as a lion needs a tamer, strong leadership provided by a tightly-organised vanguard that would help fashion revolution out of the chaos sparked by popular uprisings. Then there were populists who were so convinced that the Russian state (as Petr Tkachev explained) was “suspended in thin air” and “absolutely absurd and absurdly absolute” that its rulers deserved assassination.

Their first two attempts to kill the Tsar and the czarist system with one violent blow – a plot to blow up the emperor’s train, and an explosion in the Winter Palace prepared by Stepan Khalturin (1857 – 1882) – failed.

Stepan Khalturin (1857 – 1882)

It was third strike lucky. On March 1st 1881, a bomb thrown by the Russified Pole Ignacy Hryniewiecki (1856 – 1881), a member of the underground party called “The People’s Will” struck down and killed Alexander II. Many populists were overjoyed; but their spirits soon slumped. The regime of Alexander III arrested and executed five accomplices (Hryniewicki was killed by his own bomb), flatly rejected calls for a freely elected National Assembly, then tightened the screws of repression. Populist violence fed despotism, followed by revolution, then yet more despotism. Russians were forced to wait in the queue for constitutional representative democracy – where they are still waiting, two generations later.

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2 weeks agoby sydneydemocracyProfessor Baogang He, Alfred Deakin Professor, Chair in International Relations, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Education, Deakin University and Professor John Keane interrogate authoritarianism and democracy at ACRI UTS

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A closer look at the way politics has changed
Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two

Event Details

A closer look at the way politics has changed

Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two leading scholars to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Authoritarian populist parties have gained votes and seats in many countries, and entered government in states as diverse as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. Across Europe, their average share of the vote in parliamentary elections remains limited but it has more than doubled since the 1960s and their share of seats tripled. Even small parties can still exert tremendous ‘blackmail’ pressure on governments and change the policy agenda, as demonstrated by UKIP’s role in catalyzing Brexit.

The danger is that populism undermines public confidence in the legitimacy of liberal democracy while authoritarianism actively corrodes its principles and practices. It also increases the resolve of authoritarian regimes around the world. This public forum sets out to explain the growth and character of these regimes and the polarisation over the cultural cleavage dividing social liberals and social conservatives in the electorates, and how these differences of values translate into support for authoritarian-populist parties and leaders in the U.S. and Europe, and elsewhere. The forum highlights the dangers to liberal democracy arising from these developments and what could be done to mitigate the risks.

This event brings together Professor Pippa Norris and Professor John Keane to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Professor Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Professor John Keane will discuss his new book When trees fall, monkeys scatter.

The Speakers:

Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Pippa is a comparative political scientist who has taught at Harvard for more than a quarter century. She is ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project. Her research compares public opinion and elections, political institutions and cultures, gender politics, and political communications in many countries worldwide. She is ranked the 4th most cited political scientist worldwide, according to Google scholar. Major honors include, amongst others, the Skytte prize, the Karl Deutsch award, and the Sir Isaiah Berlin award. Her current work focuses on a major research project, www.electoralintegrityproject.com, established in 2012 and also a new book with Ronald Inglehart “Cultural Backlash” analyzing support for populist-authoritarianism.

John Keane will discuss his new book When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: rethinking democracy in China. He is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), and Distinguished Professor at Peking University. He is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy. He is the Director and co-founder of the Sydney Democracy Network. He has contributed to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Harper’s, the South China Morning Post and The Huffington Post. His online column ‘Democracy field notes’ appears regularly in the London, Cambridge- and Melbourne­-based The Conversation. Among his best-known books are the best-selling Tom Paine: A political life (1995), Violence and Democracy (2004), Democracy and MediaDecadence (2013) and the highly acclaimed full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). His most recent books are A Short History of the Future of Elections (2016) and When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017), and he is now completing a new book on the global spread of despotism.

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Speaker: Professor Gerry Stoker, University of Southampton
Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this

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Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this seminar Gerry Stoker explains how and why anti-political sentiment has grown among British citizens over the last half-century drawing on research about to be published in a Cambridge University Press book co-authored with Nick Clarke, Will Jennings and Jonathan Moss. The book offers a range of conceptual developments to help explore how citizens think about politics and the issue of negativity towards politics and uses responses to public opinion surveys alongside a unique data source-the diaries, reports and letters collected by Mass Observation. The book reveals that anti-politics has grown in scope and intensity when seen through the lens of a long view of the issue stretching back over multiple decades. Such growth is explained by citizens’ changing images of ‘the good politician’ and changing modes of political interaction between politicians and citizens. The seminar will conclude by placing these findings in a broader comparative context and exploring the implications for efforts to reform and improve democratic politics.

Chair: Dr Thomas Wynter

Discussant: Professor Ariadne Vromen

Time

(Tuesday) 11:45 am - 1:30 pm

Location

Room 276

Merewether Building, University of Sydney http://sydney.edu.au/arts/about/maps.shtml?locationID=[[H04]]

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Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against

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Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine State causing more than 650,000 Rohingyas to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous “war on drugs” has claimed more than 12,000 victims, predominantly the urban poor, including children. And the Cambodian government’s broad political crackdown in 2017 targeting the political opposition, independent media and human rights groups has effectively extinguished the country’s flickering democratic system at the expense of basic rights.

Australia’s 2017 White Paper includes the goals of “promoting an open, inclusive and prosperous Indo–Pacific region in which the rights of all states are respected” as well as the need to protect and promote the international rules based order. So what role does Australia play in addressing these problems and what more could the Australian government be doing?

To discuss these matters, we are delighted to welcome Elaine Pearson.

Elaine Pearson is the Australia Director at Human Rights Watch. Based in Sydney, she works to influence Australian foreign and domestic policies in order to give them a human rights dimension. She regularly briefs journalists, politicians and government officials, appears on television and radio programs, testifies before parliamentary committees and speaks at public events. She is an adjunct lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales. From 2007 to 2012 she was the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division based in New York.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Elaine worked for the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu and London. She is an expert on migration and human trafficking issues and sits on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Pearson holds degrees in law and arts from Australia’s Murdoch University and obtained her Master’s degree in public policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

She writes frequently for publications including Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal.

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Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way

Event Details

Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way they emerge out of ecclesiastical institutions and practices. However, I will suggest that Foucault’s contribution to political theology in a sense turns the paradigm on its head and signals a radical departure from the Schmittian model.

Foucault does not seek to sanctify power and authority in modernity, but rather to disrupt their functioning and consistency by identifying their hidden origins, unmasking their contingency and indeterminacy, and bringing before our gaze historical alternatives. Furthermore, Foucault introduces to the debate around political theology something that was entirely missing from it – the idea of the subject. The notion of the ‘confessing subject’ – the individual who, from earliest Christian times, has been taught to confess his secrets and thus form a truth about himself – is central to Foucault’s concerns, as are the ethical strategies through which the subject might constitute himself in alternative ways that allow a greater degree of autonomy. And while in the past, religious institutions and practices, particularly the Christian pastorate, have sought to render the subject obedient and governable, at other times, including in modernity, religious ideas have been a source of disobedience, revolt and what Foucault calls ‘counter-conducts’. It is here that I will develop the idea of ‘political spirituality’, showing how this notion can operate as a radical counter-point to political theology.

About the speaker:

Saul Newman is Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and currently a Visiting Professor at the Sydney Democracy Network. His research is in continental political thought and contemporary political theory. Mostly known for his research on postanarchism, he also works on questions of sovereignty, human rights, as well as on the thought of the nineteenth century German individualist anarchist, Max Stirner. His most recent work is on political theology and post-secular politics, and he has a new book forthcoming with Polity called Political Theology: a Critical Introduction.

Time

(Thursday) 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

Seminar Room 498

Merewether Building, University of Sydney

Organizer

Department of Government and International Relationsmadeleine.pill@sydney.edu.au